23andMe is built on science.  It’s in our DNA.<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Research-Icon-285x300.jpeg" alt="" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-23374" width="285" height="300" srcset="https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Research-Icon-285x300.jpeg 285w, https://blog-api.23andme.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Research-Icon.jpeg 673w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 285px) 100vw, 285px" />
We are a bunch of scientists, and science enthusiasts, who have a mission to help people access, understand and benefit from the human genome. That means, in part, making sure that our research insights are not walled off into silos that only scientists can see. We want the people who choose to participate in our research to see these insights and how their contributions make a difference.
While we take a traditional approach to rigorous scientific inquiry and publishing our findings — we now have<a href="https://www.23andme.com/publications/"> more than 110 papers</a> that have appeared in peer-reviewed publications, some of which have taken months and often years to complete — we also occasionally take a lighter approach to sharing insights from customers who have consented to participate in research.
So we’re excited to be able to share these insights back with our customers during times like Halloween, when we can dig into breakdowns of our customers’ genetic predispositions for sweet vs. salty foods. Here’s a sneak peek:
&nbsp;
<ul>
<li>Based on their genes, women in their 90&#8217;s are predicted to prefer sweets more than women in any other decade of life. While for men, it is in their 70s.</li>
<li>As for regional breakdowns, a higher fraction of people in Oregon are predicted to prefer sweet foods compared to the rest of the country. On the other hand, Hawaii has the highest fraction of customers predicted to prefer salty foods.</li>
</ul>
&nbsp;
One thing to keep in mind is that these are trends that 23andMe has observed based on genetic data from customers who have consented to participate in research. There are many reasons why the predisposition for a sweet food preference may differ between groups or regions, including differences in the ancestral backgrounds of people in a particular segment of the data, or simply random chance.
These fun and engaging findings all benefit from the same innovative data rich research model that 23andMe pioneered, and the deep expertise that our scientists bring to the table. Some of these findings are preliminary, most will never make it into a report or end up in a scientific journal, but they represent another way to share our research and engage with people in the science.
And sometimes these odd findings point to something worthy of deeper study. Can you smell <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1000993">asparagus pee</a>?

Abstract chaotic background

Research Icon

Big ‘R’ and Little ‘r’ Research at 23andMe

It&#8217;s hard to believe that unwillingness to share data is one of the biggest obstacles to the advancement of science today. But researchers and the institutions they work for expend so much time, money and effort collecting data that they are often reluctant to give it to anybody, even their most respected peers.
In today&#8217;s New York Times, biostatistician Andrew Vickers <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/health/views/22essa.html?ref=science">explains</a> why sharing research data is so critical to the advancement of medical science, and describes some of the problems he has encountered when trying to obtain valuable information for analysis.
Why are researchers so reluctant to share? Maybe they fear their colleagues will see something in the data they themselves missed, or even worse, dispute their interpretation of what the information means.
&#8220;Scientists don&#8217;t want to be scooped by their own data,&#8221; Vickers writes in the Times. &#8220;Yet this is exactly what cancer patients need. They want new results to be published as quickly as possible and to encourage a robust debate on the merits of key research findings.&#8221;
 
23andMe was founded in part to address this problem — we plan to permit outside researchers who are looking for genetic factors underlying serious diseases and conditions to gain access to the 23andMe database (under the guidance of a research advisory committee and with guidelines to protect privacy). With the collaboration of our customers, we hope to help authorized researchers advance the progress of human genetic research and maybe even find treatments or cures for some of these ailments.
The support of our customers will be essential, because these researchers will need more than raw genetic data to make discoveries. They will also need personal information, which we plan to collect through voluntary surveys and questionnaires, sometimes in concert with authorized researchers.
Though it remains to be seen how many of our customers will want to be part of what we call consumer enabled research, we are hoping their generosity will far eclipse that of some in the research community.

discoveries

Big ‘R’ and Little ‘r’ Research at 23andMe

Share Data in the Name of Science

Stay in the know.